Dear Ian: I appreciate your thoughtful post; allow me please to reflect at length. I stand by what I said. People who deal with Qumran sometimes, improperly, just use the word halakhah to mean "law" as opposed to "lore" and I did write in an earlier post "What we now call Midrash halakhah (likely, coined in opposition to the term midrash aggada) may pay attention to counter intuitive exegetical rules." Let me unpack this a bit more in terms of modern scholarship. Most scholars use terminology based on Christian categories and as such consider Jewish laws to be somewhat fanciful interpretations of the divine word. Hence their use of halakhah as an interpretation rather than a divine law. Hannah Harrington is a devout evangelical and because of this pays close attention to detail. She knows what she's talking about. But she teaches in a Bible college in Oakland and her terms may be geared to her students (consciously or otherwise). She knows halakhah is never a method. Soulen and Soulen are again caught in the Christian theological web and should have said "Midrash Halakhah" in which case their defintion would have been accurate. But even so the point is not exact since midrash Halakhah can refer even to aggadic matter, and our compilations of midrash halakhah have ample amounts of non-legal materials also. Schiffman is only correct in stating that legal rulings become attached to specific verses through various strategies but the attachment is not at all referred to as halakhah but rather (in post talmudic times) "midrash(ei) halakhah"-- ways of deriving halakhah. The ancient rabbis themselves referred to this as talmud or talmud torah (censors later changed the anathematic term talmud to gemara in the sources) and the term "yesh talmud lomar" (shortened to yesh talmud or talmud lomar, incorrectly rendered as "scripture states") introduces the verse being attached to the law for exegetical purposes. But dropping the christian terminology, the word halakhah itself does not imply exegesis at all. It is a definitive ruling, and in order to unify the oral and written laws (so the argument runs) under pressure from opponents much effort was put into developping scriptural base for many Jewish laws which had no scriptural warrant. Halakhah and exegesis are only connected if we see halivni's notion of mishnah as revolution as final (lauterbach actually said it first) but then again they did not call the process halakhah but "justified law" (halivni I think actually makes the point specifically) or midrash.
My inclination is to abandon the term and try to free the language of ancient Jewish texts from Christian/academic/ theology. Halakhah and Exegesis are separate, and even if we allow that halakhah stems from exegesis (which is not an absurd assumption) we should not allow ther terms to mix. A human being is not sexual activity, although we should admit that the one produced the other. The word Halakhah as used in Jewish literature precludes any sense of exegesis. If we want to claim that its origins lie in exegesis and take it from there we may do so. I have written at length here only because I know there is no merit in using terms with meanings that have seeped into academic parlance with loaded meanings that are antithetical to the original usages. Now I know people will claim that halakha cannot be accepted as the word of God in the academic community and that is of course true, but we should not use terms that are specific to religious traditions and strap the term with our own baggage. Strack's discussion (Intro to the Talmud and Midrash, ch 2, first page or two) makes clear the division between halakhah and written scripture. We can and should make judgments about terminolgy employed by religious traditions but we must not use their terminology as if it already reflects our functionalist/reductionalist suppositions. Students who learn bible in university alone might think that the ancient Jews accepted JEPD as givens. They cannot then understand any ancient discussions of the Bible. And yes, I have an axe to grind here: the late Willard Oxtoby objected at my PhD orals (how could a tradition so biblically based produce this gibberish!) and my supervisor, Lou Silberman objected--( Oh, they weren't protestants!) and that exchange cost me an aweful lot subsequently. Lets keep our interpretations of what is interpretation separate from the usages of the traditions we study and just use English. Herb _______________________________________________ g-Megillot mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.McMaster.CA/mailman/listinfo/g-megillot
